Is There a Special German Road to Socialism?

Posted by Bogumil

German communist Anton Ackermann’s essay of February 1946, describing the road to a socialist state based on unique German conditions

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Towards the end of the Second World War, key functionaries of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) returned to Germany from their exile in the USSR. The nation they returned to was in ruins, its cities reduced to rubble and its people in rags. The task of the KPD leaders was to try and restore this devastated country, to prepare the ground for the coming New Germany modeled on the resolutions adopted at Potsdam – a demilitarized nation, reduced in size, democratic in government, and stripped down to a largely pastoral economy. From the beginning the KPD did everything it could to convince the German people of its genuine commitment to the democratic Potsdam vision. Anticipating Germans’ strong suspicions and fear of Russia and its Soviet system, the communists downplayed references to class struggle, violent revolution and proletarian dictatorship. They promised instead an “anti-fascist parliamentary republic”; they sought alliance with non-socialist groups; they pursued full political union with the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) on conditions of total parity (something eventually achieved through KPD-SPD amalgamation into the Socialist Unity Party, SED, in April 1946). This new approach was termed “the German road to socialism”, and its chief theoretician was KPD functionary Anton Ackermann, who explored its main precepts in his February 1946 essay “Is there a Special German Road to Socialism?”. Ackermann’s theory posited that Germany faced a unique set of cultural, economic, and War-related conditions which set it apart from the historical experience of Russia and thus required different tactics: namely a peaceful, democratic path to the realization of socialism based on cooperation with other progressive forces, rather than the attainment of a socialist state through violent revolution and strict dictatorship. For a Marxist-Leninist, Anton Ackermann was a patriot, as well as something of a free-thinker. For him the “German road” idea was not just propaganda intended to mollify Germans fearful of Soviet dictatorship, but genuine application of Marxist theory to the unique historical situation of a particular country which he loved. When the SED dropped the concept in September 1948 as a “nationalist deviation” and began moving back towards a more traditional Stalinist position, Ackermann was brave enough to defend the “German road” theory to the Central Committee, resulting in his censure and punishment. Ackermann’s essay is translated below by myself from a collection of his writings.

Is There a Special German Road to Socialism?
Anton Ackermann

First published in Einheit issue 1, February 1946

The most significant all issues which now need to be resolved is the question: On what grounds and with what programme should the unification [of the KPD and SPD] occur? Out of the problems that arise from this a comprehensive debate shall take place.

However, this discussion of the programme can by no means be only the concern of certain leaders, of certain theoreticians, although the leaders of the KPD and of the SPD do have an obligation to submit clear positions to the party membership on the complicated issues which will inevitably arise.

Unification instead means accommodation between tens of thousands of active social-democratic and communist functionaries, and between hundreds of thousands of members of both parties. From the bottom to the top, both party structures ought to coalesce into an inseparable whole. Consequently, it is clear that the clarification of programmatic questions in particular is a matter not only of the leading minds of the parties but of the membership of both and, furthermore, of all those working people in possession of proletarian class-consciousness who will undoubtedly stream into the Unity Party in large numbers, because it will work like a magnet on all those workers and working people who by their very nature stand on the side of the socialist movement but who cannot decide today either for the SPD or for the KPD.

Can the working class come into possession of total political power on the democratic-parliamentary road, or only by means of the revolutionary use of force? Continue reading →

National Socialists Before Hitler, Part III: The Iglau Programme

Posted by Bogumil

“Strict völkisch thinking goes together with the immediate economic demands of labor” – The 1913 ‘Iglau Programme’ of the Austrian German Workers’ Party

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Throughout its earliest years the National Socialist movement remained largely a nationalist offshoot of social-democracy, with the German Workers’ Party’s (DAP) membership drawn almost entirely from the working-classes and its focus heavily centered on the demands and interests of the nationalist labor movement. ‘National Socialism’ existed as a concept but not yet as a coherent, completely separate ideology; those who used the term frequently intended it simply to denote a different tactical line, a new direction in which they were steering the existing socialist movement and which the social-democrats would eventually be won over to. What acted as the catalyst for National Socialism’s development into a genuinely distinct ideological worldview was the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1907, which prompted an influx of Slavs into the Austrian Reichsrat and Bohemian Landtag and, subsequently, a rush of spooked ethnic-German white-collar employees and civil servants into the DAP. Among these more ‘bourgeois’ recruits were two intellectuals who joined in 1910 – Dr. Walter Riehl and Engineer Rudolf Jung. The theoretical influence of Riehl and Jung on the movement was considerable, with both quickly establishing themselves as senior figures within the party and both trying to push it in a more radical direction. Their first major move in this regard was their drafting of a new programme, which was debated and then ratified at a party congress at Iglau in September 1913. This ‘Iglau Programme’ was a modest first step, being largely just a revision of the earlier Trautenau Programme (the economic demands of the two, for example, are almost identical apart from the new demand for a universal property tax), but the new programme’s much more overtly völkisch content, its explicit anti-Semitism (absent from the 1904 programme), and its demand for a redrawing of Austrian borders along ethnic lines, were all portents of the new direction in which ideologists like Jung and Riehl were guiding the evolving National Socialist worldview. The Iglau Programme’s more overtly völkisch perspective was significant, laying the groundwork for transitioning National Socialism further away from its social-democratic roots and towards a much broader, more distinctive philosophy encompassing ‘productive Germans’ of all classes, not just proletarians. The complete Iglau Programme is reproduced below, translated by myself from two separate sources; note that the preamble was written by Riehl, while Jung was responsible for drafting the rest of the programme.

Party Principles
of the
German Workers’ Party in Austria
Decided at the Reich Party Convention in Iglau,
7-8 September, 1913

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Preamble

The modern labor movement originated in England. The faceless exploitation of the workers by emergent capitalism at the beginning of the 19^th century led to bloody riots, which brought the workers no practical results. It was French and German scholars and researchers, without exception all members of the wealthy classes, who revised the age-old ideas of communism and socialism and created those principles which Lassalle later utilized when founding the first workers’ association in Germany. Karl Marx first created that doctrinal system of international socialism to which the German social-democrats still cling to today, at least in principle, while the socialists of almost all nations [Völker] have long since rediscovered the path to a healthy völkisch ethos, at least in practice. The teachings of the social-democratic party-saint Marx are today for the most part dismissed as obsolete, but his work maintains great influence over the independent, political miscellany of all the working masses.

His teachings on internationalism were and are unsuitable and of immeasurable harm for the German spirit [Deutschtum] of Central Europe. The working-class has a special interest in the position of power, in the maintenance and expansion of the living-space [Lebensraumes] of its own Volk. Today it is not the whims of princes that leads to conflicts between peoples, but economic competition. Especially in the most developed countries there has arisen a demand for labor; foreign workers of lesser culture have often squeezed out the old established inhabitants. This phenomenon has impacted the German nation, with its central location, with full force above all.

Social Democracy in Austria is a child of the German Reich, and its international principles were supposed to pass the acid test here. Instead its theoretical structure collapsed completely under the blows of reality. Only the poor comrades of “German tongue” cling to it with maladjusted loyalty – to their own cost. They, who used their contributions to make Social Democracy great, have in many areas been driven from their workplaces by their warmly-received Slavic comrades. German employers hired the cheaper Slavic workers; the red organization, however, failed in its duty-bound protection of its old German party veterans. This began, at last, to stir healthy instincts of self-preservation in the heads of the German workers. Inspired by the great German-national bourgeois movement of the nineties in German-Austria,¹ they founded völkisch workers’ and journeymen’s associations in various cities. They recognized the disastrousness of the international doctrines for their own Volk and the dishonesty of a Social Democracy directed by Jews and in close union with transnational big business. In the same vein they took a stance against the Black International’s² attempt to found a clerical labor party. Continue reading →

The BUF’s Norah Elam on Fascism, Women, and Democracy

Posted by Bogumil

Reflections on fascism and women’s rights by British Union of Fascists member Norah Elam, from a 1935 essay in ‘The Fascist Quarterly’

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Norah Elam, born Norah Doherty, was one of the most prominent members of the Women’s Section of the British Union of Fascists. Like many women leaders within the BUF, Elam had first become involved in political activism through the pre-WWI suffragette movement, joining the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1912 and swiftly rising to become its General Secretary by the following year. It was in the WSPU that Elam developed her skills as a propagandist and rousing political speaker. She also developed a reputation as a firebrand, someone not afraid to dirty her hands in street activism – WSPU members became notorious for militant protest actions such as window-smashing or arson, and Elam was herself arrested and imprisoned in 1914 for inciting suffragettes to violence at an open-air meeting. Her eventual transition to fascist politics was driven by a number of factors, particularly a growing sense of patriotism engendered by the War and, after women’s suffrage was finally granted through legislation passed in 1918 and 1928, a sense of disillusionment that the right to vote had not led to a significant increase in the number of women representatives. The Mosley movement, with its specific promise of women’s representation in a corporatist parliament, seemed to offer a solution that the liberal-democratic system could not, and so Elam joined the BUF in 1934. Former suffragettes like Elam found Mosleyite fascism, which presented itself as a modern and forward-thinking movement, to be a welcoming environment – 25% of the BUF membership were women, women held positions of authority and leadership in the party, and a number of women (including Elam in 1936) were put forward by the Mosleyites as candidates for election. The drive and commitment of these members was not unappreciated, as Mosley observed in 1940: “My movement has been largely built up by the fanaticism of women; they hold ideals with tremendous passion.” The article below , written by Elam and published in 1935 in BUF theoretical journal The Fascist Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 3, demonstrates some of this passion in Elam’s own words, presenting arguments for fascism not only as the true guarantor of liberty and women’s interests but also, intriguingly, as the natural continuation of the original suffragette movement.

Fascism, Women and Democracy
by Norah Elam

First published in The Fascist Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3, 1935.

“Experience shows that in all countries today democracy can develop its nature freely, the most scandalous corruption is displayed without anyone considering it of use to conceal its rascalities… Democracy is the land of plenty dreamt of by unscrupulous financiers.” – Georges Sorel, Reflexions sur la Violence.

To a genuine cynic who lived through the struggle for votes for women from 1906 to 1914, no spectacle is more diverting than the post-war enthusiast whose one obsession seems to be the alleged danger to enfranchised women in a Fascist Britain.

This unsuspected solicitude finds its most insistent champions in unlikely places, and those who were so bitter against the pre-war struggle have today executed a complete volte face. Our new-found patrons are second to none in their determination that women shall be denied nothing in principle, even if in practice they are to be denied most things essential to their existence.

To the woman who took part in that historic fight, and, regarding the vote merely as a symbol, believed that with its help a new and a better world might be possible, this kind of patronage is as distasteful as was that of a generation ago. She thinks, and with some justification, that it is humbug that those who in all those weary years never raised a hand to help her, but on the contrary were wont to describe her as an unsexed virago or a disappointed spinster, should in the hour of success endeavour to exploit her sex in the interests of a reactionary and decadent system. Such effrontery is possible only because those who resort to it entirely misunderstood and still misunderstand the meaning of that struggle, and construed the demand for political liberty as a desire for personal licence.

The time has come when the principles which underlay that remarkable and determined manifestation for ordered change, not only in the position of women but in the accepted attitude to them, should be restated. Continue reading →

Monthly Fragebogen: Kristallnacht

Posted by Bogumil

Nationalist writer Ernst von Salomon recalls events surrounding the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938

Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’, is considered one of the defining events of the history of Hitler’s Reich. On November 9, 1938 – the 15-year anniversary of the Bürgerbräukeller-Putsch – Ernst von Rath, a German junior diplomatic clerk in Paris, died in hospital. von Rath had been mortally wounded via multiple gunshot wounds two days earlier; his murderer, a teenaged Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan (Grünspan in German), was a passionate young Zionist seeking symbolic retribution for the ill-treatment of Jews in Germany. The response to von Rath’s death was retribution-in-kind, a storm of attacks by SA-men and other National Socialists against Jewish property, particularly businesses and synagogues. Individual Jews in some cases were also targeted. The claim generally is that the pogrom was organized or encouraged by the state rather than a spontaneous uprising; in either case it is clear that the government did little to prevent the attacks, even if some senior figures in both Party and government expressed a moral or political opposition to them. Such misgivings were also shared by segments of the civilian population. Nationalist writer Ernst von Salomon’s post-WWII memoir Der Fragebogen provides a first-hand example of these misgivings as they were voiced both by ordinary Germans (von Salomon and his friends) and some state officials (Otto Meißner, head of the Presidential Chancellery). von Salomon’s evident revulsion towards Kristallnacht and his discussion of the complex problems of collective guilt and complicity are especially interesting considering his earlier membership of the highly anti-Semitic terrorist movement, Organisation Consul. That von Salomon’s opposition to the regime’s anti-Jewish measures was genuine is difficult to refute, considering he sheltered his half-Jewish lover Ille Gotthelft from any potential persecution. Regardless, the author’s attempt to refute the notion that the German nation as a whole shared equal culpability for the regime’s excesses caused some controversy and debate after his book’s publication.

That November evening of 1938 Ille and I had stayed rather late at the home of my friend Axel, playing dice. I was at the time very preoccupied with my work; not only was I writing a script and a film treatment simultaneously, but I was also preparing a thick volume of endless material concerning the role of the public official in the German post-war, one of the most interesting subjects of our age and of great importance. (This book has never been published.) I had arranged an interview with Minister of State Dr. Meißner for the purpose of discussing with him his activities during 1919, and I had already made a draft of the principal points I intended to raise.

Axel lived in the Sächsischer Strasse, in Wilmersdorf, and I some ten minutes’ walk away in Charlottenburg. To reach our home by the shortest route Ille and I had to cross the Olivaer Platz, a pretty little square just off the Kurfürstendamm, which contained the shops where we bought our daily groceries. At the corner of the square, where the Konstanzer Strasse joins the Kurfürstendamm, was a small wine shop; it was here that we occasionally bought a bottle or two when we had unexpected guests. As Ille and I passed this little shop I suddenly became aware of the crunch of broken glass beneath my feet, and looking about me saw that the plate-glass front of the shop was smashed and that the bottles were quite unprotected – anybody could have stolen them.

“Some drunk must have crashed into it,” I remarked to Ille, who had stopped and was gazing at the damage. She thought we should notify the proprietor, but we did not know whether he lived in the building.

At this moment we heard a loud crash followed at once by the tinkle of falling glass. We turned around. On the other side of the street a group of apparently young men, dressed in riding boots and civilian jackets, were standing outside a café. One of them was even then picking up a stone, which he put into a cloth that he used as a sling and which, with practised skill, he hurled at one of the café’s great mirrors. There was an echoing crash and again the tinkle of falling glass.

A taxi was parked at the corner of the Konstanzer Strasse and the Kurfürstendamm. I hurried towards it while Ille, clinging to my arm, ran along beside me.

“What’s going on here?” I asked the driver. He was an elderly man who wore a military badge in his hat in place of a cockade. He looked at me and said, in his Berlin accent:

“Go on home and don’t ask questions. I ain’t taking no more fares tonight. Me, I’m keeping out of trouble.” Continue reading →